Struggles with Imagined Gods brings the ur ban phantasmagoria that one has come to associate with Hemant Divate’s poetry into the English language. This is a poetic hyper-reality in which you are assailed by an avalanche of fast-moving, colliding images of a culture dizzy on retail therapy, drunk on eternally deferred promise. Divate’s dominant poetic device is juxtaposition…
2014
At first glance, Dweepa is a fairly simple novella. It is the story of Nagaveni and her farmer husband Ganapayya who are forced to stay back, even while their fields are under threat of being submerged by the waters of a newly built dam.
Every writer has this urge to write his life. Tales of Athiranippadam by S.K. Pottekkatt is a masterly attempt by the author to share the throes of his first love, admiration for father and muted love for mother in the guise of fiction. It takes the reader through the pranks of adolescence and anxieties of being an adult.
This powerful novel by Johny Miranda captures the life of the Parangis in Kerala, who see themselves as derelicts of history. The author represents them as grave diggers and sacristans of Catholic churches in Kerala. Community members are vehement that their legacy is dear to them, and the novel has its cadences in the description…
What happens when a writer translates her/his own work? Does s/he have the liberty to edit it to suit a new audience? Does this become a new text by the author? The role of the editor and publisher is a crucial one.
With each passing year, the debates in the media are getting fiercer than what happens in the arena of bull sport known as Jallikattu (among several other synonyms like Manji Virattu or Mattu Vedikkai) in Tamil Nadu.
2014
Among the many narrative modes preva- lent in pre-modern India, the sthala-purana (or place-legend) enjoys a special stature. It is normally associated with a local temple and tells the story of how the temple came to be built on that site.
The eighteen stories by Basanta Kumar Satpathy, sampled and translated by a team of twenty collaborators in One-Eyed Chick and Other Stories, is a testimony to the belief that ‘Indian literature is one though written in many languages’.
2014
In academic circles, all discussion of the In- dian novel as it emerged in the latter half of the 19th century revolves around questions of its adjustment with a ‘derivative’ form, that of the European realist novel.
The novella Tyanantar, translated by Maya Pandit as Thereafter, belongs to one of Saniya’s 13 short story collections of which the first appeared in 1980 and the most recent in 2010.
Defying Winter, Tutun Mukherjee’s trans- lation of Nabaneeta Dev Sen’s novella about women in an old-age home in Calcutta of the eighties captures the beginning of a social shift.
In the recent scramble to celebrate the 150th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore, a host of scholars and enthusiasts have tried to recreate his image in terms of their own individual perspectives.
Novelist Tagore, the most recent endeav- our by established Tagore translator and scholar Radha Chakravarty, is proof that translation is the closest form of reading.
Rabindranath Tagore often saw in his mind’s eye his writings turn into dust ‘under the wheels of time’, as he put it in 1939. When he was barely thirty-five years of age and a rather obscure poet he wrote a poem addressing his readers a century later: ‘A hundred years from now/ I wonder who you are reading this poem of mine’ (1895).
Judy Wakabayashi and Rita Kothari’s Decentering Translation Studies: India and Beyond, now in its Indian edition, seeks to unearth what the Introduction calls the ‘local stories of translation’, premised on the assumption that local cultures and contexts determine the nature of translation and translation theory.
The nature of poetry has always been held to be fictive. That is, it doesn’t record or report facts; and even if it is recording or reporting facts, the poet’s creative imagination works on them in such a way that the quality of factualness recedes into the background. Hence, Shelley’s famous observation in his A Defense of Poetry…
This work is a collection of essays written over the past decade exploring the issue of disability, culture and society in the Indian context. The author is a sociologist working in one of the leading universities in the country giving the area of social science research and writing on disability an academic respectability…
The back page write up on this book reads thus: ‘A compendium in Prose and Verse of Crimes perpetrated after office hours on sundry aspects of economy and society by a lapsed social scientist in the cause of expanding the horizons and shaping the values of young and unpromising scholars.’
2014
The book under review opens with a con- ceptual framework for understanding local governance as it flows through the regions of good governance, decentralization and reforms in India. He has reiterated the fact that there is a vital need to shift the focus from ‘government’ to ‘governance’, there-by, emphasizing decentralization rather than delegation.
The book under review is fascinating and disappointing at the same time. It is a masterly survey of the developmental and economic history literature on the significant changes that have taken place in the global economy over a long historical period stretching into many centuries.